The 2nd meeting organized in the framework of Working Group 2 of COST Action CM1204 (XUV/X-ray light and fast ions for ultrafast chemistry) will take place in Fruska gora (Serbia) from April 27th to April 30th, 2015. It will be an expert meeting centered on biomolecules.

Deadline for registration is March 20th, 2015. Deadline for abstract submission is April 1st, 2014.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT:
The participation of a limited number of XLIC participants and speakers will be supported with the Action budget. Participants entitled for reimbursement should have been informally notified about their status.

By the end of March, all participants will receive an official invitation to the meeting confirming their eligibility status and highligting some of the COST rules for reimbursement which should be carefully examined beforeincurring any expense in:

Since the budget allocated for the meeting is limited, it is highly reccomended keeping the claims for meals and accomodation at the actual level of expensiture during the meeting (240 €/210 € per person for the whole meeting). Nevertheless. in compliance with COST rules, this subsistence expenses will be reimbursed on the basis of flat rates (no need to show invoices). The applicable flat rates for this meeting, as approved by XLIC Management Committee, are 80 EUR for accommodation and 0 EUR for meals.

For travel expenses actual costs can be claimed on the basis of the receipts provided. (Any restriction applying to travel expenses will be notified to each participant entitled for reimbursement)

IMPORTANT: Participants selected for reimbursement are kindly asked to keep their expenses as low as possible to ensure a wide distribution of the Action budget.

The submission of claims shall be done after the meeting, but, for any non-regular expense or doubt you may have, please, better ask in advance (info@xlic.eu). E.g. fligths departure/arrivals from/to places other than where the eligible participant is working/residing, extra meals, nights, taxi expenses, etc. shall not be reimbursed if permission is not requested before the meeting.

The CECAM workshop Seeking synergy between dynamics and statistics for non-equilibrium quantum processes will be held in Paris in June 6th-9th.

One of the major difficulties in achieving an accurate theoretical descriptions of non-equilibrium processes in quantum mechanical systems is framed by the desire to provide a representation of the system of interest that is as realistic as possible, in a manner that is computationally tractable. The coupling of electronic and nuclear motion involving excited states, the quantum nature of the nuclear degrees of freedom, and the application of time-dependent driving forces, are just few examples of the effects that must be addressed in order to simulate these processes. Each of these effects poses unique challenges to theoretical progress. A number of exact and approximate quantum dynamics techniques are being developed and refined in order to provide algorithms that respond to the demand for a balance between computational efficiency and physical accuracy. Currently available techniques are typically based upon two different, but equivalent, formulations of many-body quantum mechanics, the wave function approach or the density matrix picture.

The proposed workshop aims to bring together the two principal molecular quantum dynamics communities (wave-function methods and density matrix approaches). The scope is threefold, (i) to identify and explore common goals and obstacles, (ii) help in fostering new ideas to connect these approaches, and bridge the apparent gap between approximate dynamical and statistical descriptions, (iii) identify possible routes to extend dynamics approaches to the domain of statistics.

At the workshop, experts are asked to uncover the fundamental details of the methods in pedagogical lectures. These lectures will be followed by extensive discussions, during which contributed speakers and participants are welcome to put forth some of their doubts and problems in the relation between dynamics and statistics.

The next Joint Iberian Meeting on Atomic and Molecular Physics IBER 2017 will take place in Barcelona, Spain from September 12 to 14, 2017.

IBER is the biannual conference organised jointly by the Atomic and Molecular Physics Specialised Group (GEFAM) of the Spanish Royal Society of Physics and the Portuguese Society of Physics.

The main purpose of this series of IBER conferences is to bring together scientists of Iberian community dedicated to Atomic and Molecular Physics and related areas of to facilitate the interaction and exchange of knowledge between their research groups. Researchers and scientists from all over Europe and the world are invited to attend this conference and share knowledge. The conference will be structured in three days with plenary lectures, invited lectures, oral presentations and a poster session.

Registration is now open. The deadline for early-bird registration is July 6th while abstract submission will be open until June 9th. Please mark your calendars.
Approximately 10-12 contributions will be selected for oral communications. The participation of young researchers and students is particularly welcome.

Molecular reaction dynamics has become an integral part of modern chemistry and is set to become a cornerstone for much of the natural sciences. Molecular reaction dynamics is the study of elementary processes and the means of probing them, understanding them, and controlling them. It can be applied to reactions in solution and to reactions on surfaces, exploring the elementary steps in catalysis. Nowadays chemistry requires a molecular level understanding of the reactivity. Moreover, chemical kinetics in an old discipline (born in 1850) that deals with the rates of chemical reaction and how these rates depend on factors such as concentration and temperature. Although it in principle presents a macroscopic point of view, this can be directly related with the molecular point of view. Thus, kinetic or dynamic Monte Carlo simulations allow us to bridge the gap of many orders of magnitude in length and time scales between the processes on the molecular scale and the macroscopic kinetics.
The present school is open to European master and PhD students and postdocs with interest to understand chemical reactions at molecular level and to apply the theoretical and computational chemistry to this matter. First-year students of the Erasmus+ Master European in Theoretical Chemistry and Molecular Modelling will attend to this school as a part of their mandatory subjects although second-year students of this Master but from the rest of Europe it is expected that can attend too. Last year (2017) we made by first time this school and it was very successful.

The school will cover the principal aspects of the kinetics and dynamics of chemical reactions, centred mainly in the theoretical and computational approaches, although some experimental techniques will also be explained.

Photoinitiated processes are not only important for understanding natural phenomena but they also play an undeniable role in the booming fields of renewable energy, material design and medicine. Excited state processes have traditionally been explained from a static point of view, delivering in some cases a biased, incorrect or even incomplete description of the former. The simulation of the dynamics of such processes is therefore fundamental for the quest to understand the chemical and physical mechanisms.
The purpose of this school is to introduce its participants to state-of-the-art methodologies for the simulation of the dynamics of processes in the excited state, following the evolution in time of photoinitiated reactions, one of the priority topics of this call.

The school will be focused in simulating the dynamics of complex molecules. Electronic ab initio or TD-DFT methods would be sketched for obtaining the electronic wavefunctions or densities, that would be afterwards quantum-mechanically propagated. Moreover, several approaches for the treatment of the nuclei will be also provided, from full quantum dynamics to mixed quantum-classical dynamics.

The course is directed at PhD students, and young researchers, beginners in the field, working in theoretical chemistry and molecular physics.

The tutorial will be organized in 6 theoretical and 6 practical sessions, the latter taking place in the computer lab. The theoretical sessions will be of 3 hours and practical sessions will last 3 hours. The school will comprise 3 didactic blocks.
The first block will have an introductory character and will offer an overview of the field. The following block will focus on mono- and multi-configurational electronic structure methods for the description of excited states. The last block will cover dynamics methodologies. See description below. The school will end with a comprehensive overview (2 hours) of state-of-the-art applications, limitations, suitabilities, future perspectives and challenges of the different static and dynamical approaches described in the school.

The recent development of novel light sources like x-ray free-electron lasers and table-top lasers for high-harmonic generation, which are capable of delivering controllable sequences of intense sub-femtosecond ionizing pulses, has opened the way to monitor and control electron dynamics in atoms and molecules at its natural time scale, the attosecond (Chem. Rev. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.6b00453). The description of the coherent superposition of electronic continuum states that the interaction of such pulses with molecules generates goes beyond the capabilities of standard quantum-chemistry packages, which have been designed to describe the lowest bound states. Furthermore, stationary state-based pictures based on lowest-order perturbation theory are, in most cases, inapplicable. The purpose of this school is to introduce state-of-the-art ab-initio, hybrid and TDDFT numerical methods that can cope with ultra-fast dynamics in the electronic continuum of molecules, with an emphasis on unbound states in strong-fields and on the need to go beyond single-active-electron models to properly account for electron correlation. The course is directed to advanced master students, PhD students and young post-doctoral researchers in atomic and molecular physics, theoretical chemistry and applied mathematics, with an interest in developing new software for coherent control of electronic dynamics in systems of chemical interest.

The tutorial will be organized in 5 theoretical sessions and 4 practical sessions in the computer lab. Both theoretical and practical sessions will be of 4 hours. The school comprises four didactic blocks. The first block has an introductory character. It offers an overview of the field and a tutorial on strong field physics. The following three blocks focus on systems of increasing complexity and will be devoted to the description and use of new computational methods for fast time evolution in correlated systems in non-perturbative conditions (see description below). The school will end with a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art results in attosecond pump-probe and strong field molecular science obtained with ab initio “exact” simulations in small systems, on the one side, and with TD-DFT effective-field simulations, capable of coping with larger systems, on the other side. The future perspectives, challenges and mutual interaction of these two complementary approaches will be discussed.